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It’s gonna take some time to really get good at using my telescope, but in the two hours I was at it, I felt like some kind of low-level scientist. Like, a really incompetent one, haha. But a scientist, nonetheless.

Still, as I finally got my lens pointed at and focused on Jupiter (which is waaay harder than you think), I was able to see its four main moons. That’s bonkers!

Think about that. Jupiter is currently 453 million miles from Earth (according to WolframAlpha), and I am able to see it and its moons with a tube and a few pieces of glass. And really, I’m basically doing it the same way Galileo did when he discovered Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, 400 years ago.

It’s kind of incredible, and it makes me feel a sort of connection to ancient astronomers, knowing that I’m looking at the exact same celestial bodies in basically the same way they did when the cosmos were all but a mystery.

When I took astronomy in college, I was fascinated with the science, the facts, the concepts and the theories, but I always got lost in the math (there’s a reason I opted for a writing-intensive major, ha!). I like to think there’s an alternate universe version of me whose brain doesn’t panic when confronted with something more challenging than arithmetic, and maybe he got into astrophysics, haha.